Stop the European Parliament from Destroying the Internet - The #SaveYourInternet fight against Article 13 continues

All 751 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) get to vote in March/April 2019 on the negotiated copyright agreement.

THIS IS OUR LAST CHANCE TO OVERTURN THE EU COPYRIGHT REFORM

In September 2018, MEPs voted for a version of the copyright Directive which will indirectly lead to implementing upload filters on most of the services you use online. The European Parliament’s (EP) Legal Affairs (JURI) Committee Rapporteur, MEP Axel Voss, then started the ‘trilogue negotiations’ – closed-door ‘informal’ negations with the representatives of the EU Member States (Council) and the European Commission (EC). These negotiations resulted in a trilogue agreement in Mid-February 2019. Despite massive criticism, the text has been made even worse than the EP’s proposal.

See EDRi’s short summary of the most important developments in the Copyright Reform.
https://edri.org/upload-filters-status-of-the-copyright-discussions-and-next-steps/

Article 13 only benefits big businesses

Due to the collateral damage created by the vague and overly broad wording of Article 13, only big platforms and powerful rightholders will benefit from its adoption, to the detriment of all other stakeholders.

Latest Developments on the Article 13 #CensorshipMachine

In a nutshell: You can still make a difference! The Article 13 #CensorshipMachine will soon affect the content you see, upload and share on your favourite platforms, unless you reach out to your Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) today and encourage them to stop this madness! Go to your country page to and ACT NOW to #SaveYourInternet.
On 20 February 2019, the EU Member State Deputy Ambassadors approved the provisional copyright trilogue agreement during the meeting of the Committee of Permanent Representatives (COREPER 1).
At this COREPER 1 meeting, the Governments of the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Poland, Italy and Finland opposed the agreement – see their joint statement. These countries consider “that the Directive in its current form is a step back for the Digital Single Market rather than a step forward”, and add that “the Directive lacks legal clarity, will lead to legal uncertainty for many stakeholders concerned and may encroach upon EU citizens’ rights”. Belgium and Slovenia abstained from the COREPER 1 vote.
In terms of next steps, this means that:
European Parliament (EP)

26 Feb, 15h CET – JURI Committee vote: The European Parliament’s lead Legal Affairs (JURI) Committee will vote on the provisional copyright trilogue agreement on 26 February at 15h CET, during an extraordinary meeting.

March/April – EP Plenary vote: If the provisional copyright trilogue agreement is adopted in the JURI Committee, then all 751 MEPs get to vote on the agreement in an EP Plenary session in March or April. Possible Plenary sessions for this vote are: the week of 25 March (Strasbourg), 3-4 April (Brussels) or the week of 15 April (Strasbourg). There is also a Plenary session during the week of 11 March, however, it seems unlikely that a vote could take place so soon, but with the copyright file everything seem possible.

Council (= EU Member States)
The next step is now the final approval at the Ministerial level. There is no date yet for this vote. It can be expected that the Council will only vote after the EP adopts the agreement at a Plenary vote.
Background on the provisional copyright trilogue agreement:
On 13 February, the European Parliament and Council, represented by the Romanian Council Presidency, reached a provisional trilogue agreement on the copyright reform.
The provisional copyright trilogue agreement that got brokered between the EU institutions, which is basically the Franco-German deal on Article 13 that was reached in Council – read more below, implies that:

Platforms will have to attempt to license all the content that can be uploaded on their platform, which is unfeasible; and,

Failing to licence everything, they will need to do whatever they can to prevent unauthorised content from ever appearing on their platform, which will require them to implement upload filters to censor your content.

These filters will catch everything that even remotely looks suspicious, because failing to comply with the above makes platform directly liable for any possible copyright infringement on their platforms. This means that perfectly legal content will also be caught in the web of the filternet.

There are so-called ‘user safeguards’ and something that the legislators dare to call a ‘user-generated content’ (UGC) provision, but both are toothless and will leave users in the cold. The upfront removal of content will leave users powerless, and complaints will be just a waste of time – especially for time-sensitive campaigning content for human and digital rights organisations. The UGC provision shows that legislators have no understanding of what they require platforms to do, as filtering mechanisms are not able to identify legal content based on conditions which normally require lawyers and judges to interpret them.

See MEP Julia Reda’s analysis and the one from CREATe for more details.
https://juliareda.eu/2019/02/eu-copyright-final-text/
https://www.create.ac.uk/agreement-reached-at-final-trilogue-negotiation/
Background on the Franco-German disagreement and compromise:
On Friday 18 January 2019, the EU Member States Deputy Ambassadors gathered in a meeting of the Council’s Committee of Permanent Representatives (COREPER 1). The Romanian Council Presidency (1 Jan – 30 Jun, 2019) had requested a revised negotiation mandate on, amongst others, the Article 13 #CensorshipMachine. At this meeting, a number of Member States (Belgium, Croatia, Germany, Finland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, and Slovenia) blocked the Romanian Presidency. Portugal indicated that it needs more time to take a position.
This led the Romanian Council Presidency to postponing their negotiations with the European Parliament, i.e. trilogue negotiations, which were originally scheduled for 21 January. This ‘blocking minority’ was only achieved thanks to Germany opposing the proposals on the table. More specifically, there was a disagreement between the French and German delegation about the scope of Article 13: the German Government wants to exclude businesses with annual revenues of up to 20 million euros per year, whilst the French Government considers that no one should fall outside the scope of the #CensorshipMachine.
The Franco-German disagreement on the fate of small- and medium enterprises (SMEs) got settled in early February, with France succeeding in maintaining all SMEs within the scope of the Article 13 #CensorshipMachine, whilst giving the German some useless SME carve-out that will never be meaningful in practice for any ambitious EU startups, as it is still requires all SMEs to negotiate licensing agreements and only exempts very small businesses (less than 10 million euros turnover) that are less than three years old from the filtering obligations.
The result of this Franco-German “horse trading” was poured into a new revised negotiation mandate by the Romanian Council Presidency, leaked by POLITICO, and which was adopted on February 8, 2019.
https://www.politico.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Mandate-Romania-February-8.pdf

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The controversial copyright law facing a final vote in the EU parliament is less about copyright than it is about hammering a final nail in the coffin of the freedoms the internet once promised. Yes, Article 13 is that bad.

Most laws address themselves toward tangible, human-sized problems. Article 13, the sweeping European copyright legislation that proposes to filter all content on its way to the web to ensure no rights are being violated, isn’t interested in such prosaic stuff. It seeks to defy the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Physics? In my internet? The web operates according to the laws of entropy. It trends toward decentralization – of ideas, of social groups, but most importantly of power. Authority looks at this delightful disorder and sees only malevolent chaos that needs to be reined in. Legislators and the corporations that run their countries have spent a lot of time brainstorming on how to put the cat back in the bag, and Article 13 is the result.

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The way the web developed the first time was not ideal for centralized power structures. Only a nuclear option like Article 13 could ever hope to rein in the human potential unleashed by the web and give them a second chance to get it right.

Article 13, the internet’s founding fathers warn, means the “transformation of the Internet from an open platform for sharing and innovation, into a tool for the automated surveillance and control of its users.” That’s a feature, not a bug. Keeping out small platforms that could challenge the monopolies that have shown they’re willing to work with governments certainly makes life easier for those governments. The internet once held the promise to liberate humanity. The European Parliament believes that’s too big a risk to take.